


Taking a Cab from Tribeca to Washington Heights on New Year's Eve and Other Questionable Decisions

by battle_cat



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Awkward First Non-Dates, F/M, First Meetings, New Year's Eve, New York City, Oral Sex, Pre-Canon, Vaginal Sex, this turned into an Anne character study more than anything else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 01:39:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17132597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Eddie and Anne, meeting for the first time as mid-20-somethings in mid-2000s New York City. Things get spicy fast.





	Taking a Cab from Tribeca to Washington Heights on New Year's Eve and Other Questionable Decisions

They meet at a New Year’s Eve party thrown by a college buddy of Eddie’s who went into finance. It’s in an absurd loft in Tribeca that his buddy bought right after 9/11, when nobody wanted to live downtown. Keeping the windows closed for a year during cleanup was worth it; now the place is worth millions.

Eddie goes on a whim, with the flimsy excuse that there’ll probably be lots of hedge fund douchebags there and maybe he can turn up some dirt on one of them that could turn into a story. Definitely not because he’s lonely and the city feels simultaneously overwhelming and isolating.

Anne is there, in a severe black and white dress that would look funereal on most people but looks scary-hot on her. She came with a friend who works with a friend of his friend at Morgan Stanley. She looks way less out of place than he does, but equally bored, and as they both mingle and make meaningless small talk their eyes meet across the room more than once.

Finally, while he’s lingering by the cheese plate, she walks up to introduce herself. She gives him an unsubtle once-over after names and who-do-you-knows are exchanged. 

“So. You’re way too scruffy for i-banking.” She’s sucking an olive from the pile in the center of the cheese plate, and he’s way too distracted by the razor-sharp line of her lipstick to interpret what she just said as an insult. “So what do you do?”

“Ah. Journalist. Tryna be, anyway. Mostly freelance.” She’s making way too much eye contact. Is he blushing? He hopes he’s not blushing. “You?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“I hate lawyers,” he says, and then immediately thinks _Why did I say that? I’m such an asshole._

She raises an eyebrow. “Your opinion is noted.” She spears a cube of aged cheddar and walks away from him.

 

The supremely annoying thing is, Anne keeps noticing him as the evening goes on. She notices him as he floats from conversation to conversation, easily miming interest in the introductions and small talk but then going quiet and finding an excuse to slip away. She notices him as he eats half the dry-cured sausage spread, stealthily, so that no one paying less attention than her would register it. She notices him as he refills his plastic cup of Maker’s on the rocks: once, twice.

She is reasonably sure he is the only person here who’s not in finance, corporate real estate or law, and, his opinions about lawyers aside, that automatically makes him the least boring person in the room. She’s wearing a Bergdorf dress that she hopes no one will recognize from the fall sample sale. (First-year associates don’t make _that_ much, for fuck’s sake). He looks like the kind of guy who has formal-occasion t-shirts. He’s got stubble and tattoos and he came in wearing a well-used motorcycle jacket that makes her wonder whether he has a bike to go with it when Canal Street isn’t coated with a sheet of black ice. He sticks out like a sore thumb, and he doesn’t seem to give a fuck. It’s infuriatingly hot.

She has a system for guys. How they react to being straight-up propositioned by a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer with an immaculately-maintained ice queen persona puts them on a scale. Whether subsequent interactions move them up or down that scale determines how long she keeps them around.

By ten PM she’s drunk enough pinot grigio to loosen up a bit but no so much she’s at risk of doing something stupid, and she’s decided she’s going to end the night fucking Eddie Brock, tryna-be reporter. The friend she came with is busy sucking face with some venture capital bro; a text later to confirm she’s safe will do perfectly fine. So when Eddie Brock heads for the door, tapping a pack of cigarettes against his palm, she follows.

 

It’s frigid outside, and his gloves have gone AWOL, again. He alternates cigarette-holding hands, warming one with his breath while stuffing the other in his pocket.

He should quit anyway. For real this time.

“Can I bum one?”

Oh shit. It’s Anne. The lawyer. The scary-hot lawyer he’d managed to offend almost as soon as he opened his mouth. She’s wearing a scarlet peacoat, because of course she is; why would someone like her be satisfied with a _black_ peacoat like ninety-eight percent of other New Yorkers?

Lighting a cigarette for her requires standing very, very close, and when she takes a drag she only takes half a step backward, exhaling a dramatic plume of smoke into the icy air over her shoulder.

“Hey, uh, um, the thing—upstairs—” he mumbles. “I was being a dick. I don’t…there’s, there’s some good lawyers out there.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I didn’t get into it to be liked.” She smiles, and for a second there’s a flash of something warm under her burnished steel exterior. “Lots of people hate lawyers. And, I’ll admit, the circumstantial evidence is compelling.”

She leans in, right into his space, a quivering inch away from touching him. “But.” She’s looking him straight in the eye, the hand not holding her cigarette tracing the edge of his jacket lapel. “I suspect you may be open to a counter-argument.”

 

They take a cab up the West Side Highway to his apartment. She pays.

He lives in a cavernous prewar four-bedroom in Washington Heights that he shares with five roommates. It’s not the grossest place she’s ever hooked up with someone in. At least he has his own room. She brushes off his nervous offers of a beer or a joint and steers him straight there. It’s the size of a walk-in closet, but he has managed to cram a full-size bed in there.

“Think my roommates are all out,” he says as she peels off her coat. There’s nowhere obvious to leave it except the unmade bed.

“Good.” She backs him up against the wall. In heels she’s only an inch shorter than him. “Because I hate being quiet.”

And then they’re kissing and he’s…definitely an above-average kisser, and even better once he warms up a little. She’ll have stubble-burn on her chin tomorrow but his lips are really soft and it’s a nice combination. He’s hesitant with where to put his hands, but doesn’t mind when she places them where she wants them, on her waist and her ass. She presses against him and rocks into his touch and soon enough she can feel him relaxing, letting his hands and his mouth move without overthinking it. She slides her hands under his shirt— _goddammit_ he works out—and peels it off him, and then she takes care of her dress and her bra as well because guys tend to have unsexy struggles with zippers and clasps and it’s not worth derailing something that’s going surprisingly well so far. She pushes away thoughts about how dirty his floor might be as she steps out of her dress and kicks off her shoes.

He breaks the kiss long enough to murmur, “What do you want?” against her lips, and fuck, well, if he’s asking—

“Go down on me, and then fuck me.” And God _fucking_ dammit, there is not a split second of hesitation; he drops to his knees right there, kissing her hip while he peels down her pantyhose and underwear, and the geometry of his closet-sized room is such that if she leans back against the side of the cheap Ikea dresser she can put one foot up on the bed and give him all the access he needs.

He’s not particularly…creative…down there, but man, he takes direction like a champ. She moans appreciatively when he gets his tongue in the right spot, and once he’s figured it out he just _commits._ “Ohh fuck—there right _there_ don’t you dare stop—” she gasps out, and she has to grab the corner of the dresser because her legs are shaking all of a sudden, and fuck, _fuck,_ that feels really fucking good; she can hear herself moaning and swearing and she really is glad his roommates aren’t here; she does like being loud but this sounds like a person she doesn’t recognize, a person who’ll let a random one-night stand who doesn’t even know how to _dress_ completely take her apart—

_Fuck._ She’s coming, and she’s making these really obscene moans, and she’s holding on to the edge of the dresser for dear life, and Eddie _Fucking_ Brock is eating her out with his _stupid_ mouth until she’s too sensitive and she has to pull away from him.

She only realizes when she lets go that she’d been digging her hand into his hair hard enough it must’ve hurt. He doesn’t look like he minded. His lips are swollen and red and wet and he looks kind of stunned.

“Get up here.” It comes out a bit harsher than she intended, but again he doesn’t hesitate, lets her pull him in and kiss his mouth that is absolutely _soaked_ with her juices. He’s still in his jeans and she can feel how hard he is.

“Dunno if I have a—” he mumbles when she starts unbuckling his belt.

“I have a condom.” She didn’t shell out for that red peacoat for nothing; its many hidden pockets mean she is always prepared. She scrambles for it; she holds the little plastic package in her mouth while she pushes him back on the bed and tugs his pants down below his knees; she suits up his dick and sinks down on him in one slow, determined slide. It’s a lot all at once but she can commit to things too.

He grunts helplessly when she’s got him fully inside her, moans when she starts rocking her hips, and this is much better, this feels like she’s in control again, and she can tell him where to put his hands again, on her thighs just above the knee where he gets to touch her as little as possible; she can tell he wants more, he keeps trying to reach for her but she puts his hands back where she wants them and after the second time he gets it. She is pretty sure by now that what he _really_ wants is to do what he’s told. And that…she can work with that.

He doesn’t last very long with her on top of him; comes with an undignified groan before her thigh muscles are even starting to really burn. She rolls off him and lies on his slightly dude-sweat-smelling sheets while he catches his breath and deals with the condom and she tries to parse what just happened.

Her standards when it comes to one-night stands…well, the bar is low. No whining about wearing a condom. No attempts at surprise anal. No choking. No requests to ejaculate in or on some weird part of her body. Anything beyond that is an unexpected bonus. If she decides to keep them around past the initial lawyer-innuendo-filled come-on (they _always_ fall for the lawyer innuendo), most of them are trainable, but for a first-time hookup her expectations are minimal at best. A guy actually making her come the first time they had sex—on his own, not just her rubbing herself off while he rabbits into her—she can’t remember the last time that happened.

Add to that the fact that she and Eddie seem to have certain…compatible dynamics and the possibilities are downright dangerous.

Eddie comes back to bed, still fully naked (goddammit he _really_ works out) and curls up next to her on his side, very close but not touching, like he wants to cuddle but isn’t sure he’s allowed. 

Four floors below them, a wave of cheering and noisemakers and firecrackers erupts, mingled with shouts of “Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year,” he slurs, already sounding like he’s falling asleep.

She rolls over to kiss him, and when she pulls back he’s looking at her with such earnest adoration that she has to roll over and stare at the ceiling again.

“I should get going,” she says. She does _not_ do sleepovers after a first fuck.

“Never get a cab right now,” he mumbles. “Stay a little while.”

She’s annoyed but he’s right. Maybe just a little while, she thinks, until that window of time long enough after midnight but before the bars close.

“Anne?” Something about the way he says it makes her look at him. His face is mostly buried in the pillow but the bit that she can see looks…embarrassed, maybe?

“I gotta tell you something.”

Oh great. Whatever the thing is that’s going to ruin the dangerous potential of this unexpectedly good hookup, here it is.

“Just to be clear,” Eddie mumbles half into the pillow. “‘M telling you this cause I think you’re really hot and I already kinda wanna have sex with you again when I’m not falling asleep.”

“Okay…”

“I haven’t, uh, been with a woman in a while. I mean…I’ve, y’know, had girlfriends and stuff. But, um, lately I’ve, I’ve mostly been hooking up with guys.” He’s actually blushing.

“That’s it?” She tries not to think about the palpable amount of relief she feels.

“You’re…not weirded out by that, are you?”

“No! God, no. It’s two-thousand-fucking-six in New York City, Eddie.”

“Oh. Good.” He looks really kind of painfully relieved. “Some people are weirded out about it.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“I like women too, y’know.” She would have thought she’d made it clear he didn’t have to keep explaining but here we are. “It’s just, sometimes with guys it’s…easier.”

“To get what you want?”

“Yeah.”

“Which is…someone else being in control.”

Now he’s _really_ blushing. “‘S…that obvious?”

“I had a hunch.” She’s back to looking at the ceiling again. There’s a huge crack in the plaster, running from the wall behind the bed to almost the center of the room.

“I like being in control, y’know.”

“That’s come to my attention.”

That makes her smile. She wiggles just a little bit closer to him in the bed. After a moment he puts his head on her shoulder, and when she doesn’t object he curls an arm over her stomach.

“Stay here,” he mumbles into her shoulder. “‘S lots of drunk people out there.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Thanks.” She doesn’t do sleepovers, and definitely not on first hookups, but staying here is infinitely more practical for fucking him again in the morning. And, well, she is nothing if not pragmatic.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [fuckyeahisawthat](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com) on Tumblr. Still alive!


End file.
